Riding The Dragon is a BattleTech fanfic set in the late Third Succession War when an almost successful coup in the Draconis Combine leads to a new leader and a significantly different set of alliances and wars than in canon.
You can find it on fanfiction.net here
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Riding the Dragon provides examples of the next tropes:
- Action Mom: Cecilia Kurita is a loving mother of three and more than willing to crush her enemies beneath the feet of her sixty-ton Battlemech.
- Aerith and Bob: Cecilia and her daughter Siriwan.
- Altar Diplomacy: Averted with Hanse and Cecilia who know that the most that their realms can manage would be a guarded truce.
- Played straight, after a fashion, with Duncan Marik and Gabriel Quinn.
- Alternate Universe: Takashi and Theodore Kurita die, leading to an alternate Kurita dynasty and entirely averting the Federated Commonwealth alliance.
- Combat by Champion: Cecelia and Hanse duel in their Battlemechs over the division of spoils from the Halstead Station cache. They've already decided to divide it evenly but need to sell this to their respective followers so the duel is done entirely for the drama.
- Elevator Going Down: May or may not have happened in the Grand Canal Hotel. If so they didn't get caught.
- Feuding Families: More or less the entire premise of the Succession Wars and why Hanse and Cecilia can never marry or even admit to their trysts.
- Love at First Sight: Hanse and Cecilia hit it off and have a lightning illicit romance over the span of a few days, despite the fact that they know it can never be more.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Basically how Cecilia became Coordinator. Her elder brother launched a coup against their cousins and tried to recruit her. She refused in a dramatic manner but in the process elevated herself to a political status such that she had to take the throne herself or be executed by whoever did as a threat to them.
- Puppet King: Yoriyoshi's attempted coup would have reduced Cecilia to this if it had succeeded.
- Star-Crossed Lovers: With centuries of warfare between their dynasties (including one war directly caused by a marriage between House Kurita and House Davion) Hanse and Cecilia acknowledge that they can never allow their romance to be publicised.
- Trigger: Michael Hasek-Davion's clone is programmed to mimic his originator's documented phobias which lead to him suffering a cataclysmic mental breakdown when faced with a perfect storm of these hitting him at once.
